DM ME FOR BUG TALES
Yeah the real issue in a way is that there’s just so much evidence of evolution happening that it’s hard to find a single shared pattern to study
Sometimes ants can’t smell ants either and you get supercolonies
Aussie magpies are ridiculously smart, love them as an example of convergent evolution since they are not corvids but rather songbirds that have evolved to be more crow-like to fill a similar niche to corvids
Studio Ghibli vibes
love me some land crustaceans
One common test is the famous “mirror test” where an animal is given some problem that can only be solved by using its own reflection in a mirror for reference, such as a study involving an Australian ant. They put a blue dot made of felt (I think) on the ant’s head behind the antennae, and watched the ant clean itself once it saw that it’s reflection had a weird blue thing on its head. But I don’t know if there are other tests for “self awareness”
Thankfully I crawled through with a passing grade, it’s all behind me
But the benzene rings, they still haunt my nightmares
So ashamed of how shit I was at organic chemistry
My brain just could not complete those fucking benzene rings why am I so INCOMPETENT WHY
That question below is honestly a good way to demonstrate how bad people can be at understanding what would be called materialism without it being explained to them first
Easy to assume the shape of that flower is due to decisions made by the plant itself instead of the more accurate way of understanding its shape being the result of external conditions and pressures acting upon the plant and its flower growth over a long time
Naked mole rats are considered an example of a truly “eusocial” mammal analogue to ants. More evidence for the idea that social behavior/societal grouping, once established in a species, characterizes it more potently than just about anything else in its genetic history. Chimps might be our closest genetic relatives, but the way we live and think is probably much more similar to these guys.